Consider the following two headlines during the past three weeks: “U.S. Strike Kills ‘150 al-Shabaab Terrorists’ in Somalia” (March 7, The Telegraph) “49 Killed in U.S. Airstrike Targeting Terrorists in Libya” (February 20, CNN) The reason for the Somalia killings? US...

It seems that Iraq will continue to haunt the American people for the indefinite future. And it should. Including the Persian Gulf intervention, the 11 years of sanctions, the no-fly zones, the post-9/11 invasion and and occupation, and the post-occupation bombing,...

If you have ever yearned for a perfect example of the interventionist mindset that undergirds the mainstream media, the Washington Post provided it last Sunday in an editorial entitled “Failure in Cuba.” The editorial could have easily been written by any member of US...

It is standard strategy in North Korea for officials to keep the citizenry constantly on edge about the possibility of a US attack. The idea is that if people are kept afraid, they will inevitably rally to the government, ignore their desperate economic plight, and...

While President Obama was tearing up to support his call for gun control, the US military-industrial complex was celebrating its continued leadership in the sale of weaponry to foreign regimes. According to the New York Times, US foreign arms deals increased nearly...

Lovers of big government love crises because crises are the sure-fire way to get big government. It is during crises that many people go into a fright-filled panic, demanding that government assume extraordinary powers to keep them safe. Government officials, of...

I wonder what goes through the mind of an Iraq War veteran when someone says, “Thank you for your service.” I wonder if he ever asks himself, “What exactly am I being thanked for?” Consider what the Bush administration did to US soldiers on the eve of the US invasion...

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein has an op-ed in today’s New York Times entitled “Let’s Finally Close Guantanamo,” in which she points out what critics of the Guantanamo facility have been saying for years: It is a very effective tool that overseas terrorist...

Given the ongoing disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and the rest of the Middle East, how can anyone in his right mind still be an interventionist? Look at Iraq. The US invasion and multi-year occupation of that country was supposed to bring a...

Consider the impact on the civil liberties of the American people of four of the non-stop wars that the U.S. government has been waging for a very long time: the war on drugs, the war on terrorism, the war on immigrants, and the war on wealth. These four wars have...

Last January the movie American Sniper was breaking box-office records and generating a national debate over the nature of war and how the movie depicts war. The movie revolved around Chris Kyle, a real-life US soldier who had four tours in Iraq as a sniper and, in...

On the 70th anniversary of the US government’s nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there are still people coming out in favor of the bombings. They’re saying that since the bombings shortened the war by bringing a quick surrender of Japan in World War II, the...

Everyone has to do some serious soul-searching when it comes to dealing with the cops. This is especially true for African-Americans, given that police departments seem to have attracted a disproportionate share of racial bigots to that line of work. But it’s also...

Imagine that Russia announced that it was reconstituting the Warsaw Pact and that Cuba, Venezuela, Chile, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Bolivia had signed on as members. Imagine also that Russia fomented a regime-change operation in Mexico that succeeded in...

During the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA made multiple attempts to assassinate Cuba’s ruler, Fidel Castro. Let’s assume that the CIA had succeeded and that Castro had been shot dead on the streets of Havana. It’s not difficult to imagine what US national-security state...

The case of Mohanad Mahmoud Al Farekh is a perfect example of how the national-security state apparatus that was grafted onto our federal governmental structure as part of the Cold War has revolutionized America’s governmental system. Farekh is an American citizen....

It is impossible to overstate the magnitude of the warfare-state revolution that transformed the federal government and American society after World War II. The roots of America’s foreign-policy crises today, along with the massive infringements on civil liberties and...

George Washington pointed out, “Overgrown military establishments, which under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty, and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to Republican Liberty." Wise words by the father of our country, but ones,...

Ever since the advent of the Cold War, US officials have told us that it was necessary for the United States to adopt the totalitarian structure known as the national-security state in order to combat communist totalitarianism. We are now witnessing a similar...